What criteria do you think luxury brands need if they want to find someone to be a design director?
According to the inference of ordinary people's thinking, this person must at least learn a little design, right?
But some people don't seem to have anything particularly outstanding, just look familiar
But overnight became the menswear creative director of the universe big brand LV. That is to say, in the future, LV's menswear line will be designed by him. To this end, the official LV IG devoted an entire page to welcome him.
Not only that, but almost all the media that can be named in the world have reported on this matter, even if it is not related to fashion ▼
This kind of battle is rare in the fashion industry in the past.
Those who are familiar with the European and American entertainment circles will definitely be able to recognize it, this is Pharell Williams, known as Fei Dong. Many people should not know what he is doing, at most they feel that he is in the hip-hop circle, and he has a good relationship with Lafayette.
Let's take a look at what Wikipedia has to say about him ▼
The more striking tags above describe him as: record producer, rapper, singer.
Dare to love LV This is to find a rapper as a designer?
Naturally, many netizens couldn't sit still, and they all voiced doubts. It is not difficult to understand, because the current designer of Balenciaga, who has also suffered criticism, Demna Gvasalia, is still from the Royal Academy of Art in Antwerp.
Non-professional, do not understand fashion, but dressed a little trendy and was so favored by LV. This thing seems a bit outrageous, but maybe don't worry too much about it, because their previous menswear design director Kim Jones is also a mixer, and the former late designer Virgil Abloh is a "mediocre" trendy player.
And in Fei Dong's own words: I am a person who has a great love for fashion, and becoming a designer is an innate dream.
Therefore, people still have to have dreams, and they will become LV design directors one day.
To paraphrase a very cliché: success depends on 1% luck + 99% effort. No one is born with the ability to shine like gold in a certain field, even if they are talented, but if they work hard, they must be more reliable.
Pharell Williams grew up on the beaches of Virginia Asia to handyman parents. Music was an interest instilled in him by his grandmother, and after contact, he discovered that he loved it from the bottom of his heart.
As we all know, children's interests need to be cultivated by parents from an early age, but Fei Dong's difference is that his love is cultivated by himself, and he does not need any urging. So at any stage of his growth, he could be seen trying to play music.
The first band was formed in 1990 and for the next 30 years, every day was doing things related to music. Everyone has seen what happened after that, and he won 13 Grammys in one fell swoop and was nominated for two Oscars for movie songs.
He also produced related music for Chanel's capsule series, which also caused a lot of turmoil in the fashion circle at that time, and if you are interested, you can go to YouTube to listen to it~
Interlaced like a mountain, it may be difficult for ordinary people to evaluate the hip-hop music that Fei Dong is good at. But there is a general consensus that musicians who make this unique form of music are more concerned about the power of appearance than any other kind. After all, whether a rapper's image is sharp or not will greatly help him improve his aura when fighting on stage.
Most hip-hop artists are eager to own countless luxuries to prove how successful they are, and Filip Dong is no exception. Wear it on weekdays, and dress more elegantly than others, not too pompous but showing just the right swag.
Having a certain aesthetic and taste is the first step to becoming a designer. Fei Dong won the Fashion Icon Award from the CFDA (American Council of Fashion Designers Awards) in 2015 for "being too good at wearing", and Kanye, who is now Ye, presented him with the award.
"Pharell has always been my idol in dressing, and without Fidon, there would be no me and no A$AP Rocky."
——Kanye West
In the end, Galeries Lafayette will use him as an inspiration muse to design and create, and invite this rapper to countless Chanel shows.
A rapper who can't do design isn't a qualified fashion icon. While dressed as the ceiling of the rapper world, he also dared to do design research. First tried the waters with Nigo, the big man in the fashion circle, to create his own brand BBC, but there are always a few people who can understand them. If it is not deliberately mentioned, it is not possible that the fashion industry knows that this brand exists.
Since it did not succeed, it continued to try, and successively cooperated with well-known fashion brands and designers such as Takashi Murakami, Kaws and Human Made, but the result was still thunder and rain.
People who can become LV designers will not give up so easily on a track that does not belong to them. Pharell Williams is pretty good at grasping the essential connection between things, and he has known for many years that even luxury brands need the thrill of something new, and that it's boring to be cold. So he applied hip-hop creative thinking to Chanel's products for the first time, and the NMD launched by Adidas and Chanel was instantly hyped from 7,000 to 70,000 by the hands of Filipino Dong, creating the first sales myth in the history of luxury goods.
Galeries Lafayette also launched a special cooperation series for him, which was designed by Fei Dong himself, and once again sold to his parents who did not dare to recognize it. In particular, series bags rose to 5 times the selling price in the secondary market.
When a designer's dream comes true through his own persistence and trial and error. Although Fei Dong has now deleted the content of his past social accounts because of LV's "new beginning", fans may have an impression of his busy daily life. When working on his own brand design with Nigo, he can stay up late for a month because of a cuff design detail, and he will also overturn all previous ideas in the process of working with Chanel because of a certain color match in the upper... This has a tacit understanding with the late creative director of LV menswear Virgil Abloh, which shows that LV's selection of Filipino Dong is not a whim.
Okay, so let's take a look at the history of Filipino Dong's fortune:
A child who grew up in an ordinary family in the United States, with a design dream and no knowledge of anything but music, founded a band with friends, and then played music for a few years, because the musical style needed to study and dress, but the designer's dream always burned passionately in his heart, so he began to try hard in the field he was not good at, failed to continue trying, and then was appreciated by Lafayette and achieved his design highlight moment, and finally, he was successfully seen by LV and became LV's menswear creative director.
See, the phrase "what is the difference between people without dreams and salted fish" is not nonsense, and if you understand the meaning of it, you may become a "LV designer".
Finally, let's conclude with CFDA Chairman Diana von Furstenberg's comments on Pharell Williams, and wait and see what he will see for the first season of the LV menswear collection in June.
If "cool" is a person,
That must be Pharrell.
This article is edited by Miss Wendy
Art Editor: Beanie